morrisseyed

I’ve marked it, on 17 Nov 2008. There I was in the grocery store, trying to remember if the flour i needed is all-purpose or white, when I heard the christmas carols over the PA system. now,I know that the christmas music has been noticed by others since at least around hallowe’en, but this was still a little bothersome. I don’t take kindly to hearing christmas music before my birthday. my birthday, i think, is a good benchmark in the run-up toward christmas, in fact, I would say it is even superior to american thanksgiving, but i suppose i’d have to argue that one away with some 350 million people, so I’ll keep mum on that subject and just rant on about our consumerist fetishes instead.

anyway, i immediately grew bitter when i heard the carols. I wanted to shut my eyes, open them, and find myself in a delillo novel since I was basically in one at that moment.

the next best thing to this wish, of course, would be to start humming some matthew good, who used to rock out on the gen-x angst and po-mo for us back in the day. but of course, i couldn’t even do that, because the nature of my predicament - hearing the carols - prevented me from even taking the medicine - humming a tune to drive it all away. It was a downward spiral.

i did eventually break out of the spiral and find my solace when i got home. oh internet, you fix things every time. you are my solace, you giant simulation. anyway, the lyric in question in this song is around the 2:30 mark. I’ve been going on about it for years now, so I won’t say anymore.

(oh, and finally, even though i do like this video for its politics and its massage (cf McLuhan there, of course), I still think it reeks of Adbusters. while i’m politically aligned with a lot of what Adbusters espouses, I think the place is a racket, and that Kalle Lasn is almost as bad as some of the people he criticizes. Kalle wants us to culture jam, yes, but he wants us to culture jam with his message only. he wants us to wipe the slate clean, but we wants us to wipe it clean so we will see things his way. if i were to mindlessly read Adbusters the way he wants me to, I might gain back my street cred for pinning my anti-corporate beliefs on my sleeve, but I’d still be an automaton, only now an automaton who is against corporations without really understanding all the reasons why. even though i do see the world the way Kalle sees it, i think his line of thinking and mode of delivery is awfully presumptuous and a little patronizing.)

I often shake my head in disgust when I think about my appreciation for Matthew Arnold. That guy was a conservative nutbar at the end of his life, but some of his lit, and a lot of his criticism really hit the mark for me (case in point: i’ve quoted his definition of culture on another site for well over a year now). In the end, the guy was a wicked critic because he was adept at not letting his own politics rule over his works.

Anyway, I discovered this morning that the SMU Ferguson Library, a small hole-in-the-wall service for some of the school’s patrons, made a sound recording of _Culture and Anarchy_ back in 1990. That’s awesome - I hardly think there are many sound recordings of old Mr. Arnold lying around; he isn’t your run-of-the-mill listen-on-your-way-to-work sort of author

all this remembrance day talk has got me thinking about about some words i wrote on Lille long ago, in july of 2008.  it’s a typical digression on the past that ends with my becoming melodramatic (par for course, i know).

i’m too tired to say anything else, except that this this evening i found at Kinko’s someone’s “Condolences From The State” card (or whatever it is called) that announced Pte John Hancock’s death in France, dated 26 Dec 1944.  I turned the card in to the Kinko’s rep, because I’m sure some one else is going to come looking for it, but not without photocopying it first.  It felt wrong in some ways, like i was photographing the dead.  but in other ways it felt like making the photocopy was right to do.  for a moment there i was holding on to some one else’s punch in the stomach, and i couldn’t let that feeling go.

i’ll scan the page later so we can all feel the burn..